


Lead Me To Your Door

by lady_ragnell



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Minor Violence, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28094595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Dutch arrives on a space station to do a job and is surprised to see a very familiar ship a few berths over.
Relationships: Dutch | Yalena Yardeen & Johnny Jaqobis
Comments: 21
Kudos: 52
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Lead Me To Your Door

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Galadriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galadriel/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, **Galadriel**! I'd been looking for an excuse to write something post-canon for these two, so I hope you like it!
> 
> Title from "The Long and Winding Road" by the Beatles.

Someday Dutch is going to buy a spaceship that likes her best.

“And I am going to find the biggest trash compacter in the Quad and drive you directly into it no matter what D'avin says,” she tells the Black Root ship she's attempting to pilot into its berth. It is not intimidated, and it doesn't even answer her back. It just makes a clunky landing, jarring her, and then smugly powers down. She's pretty sure it's backwards, and she curses it in every way she knows how while she gets her equipment and the joy the dock attendant is going to demand.

Sure enough, the dock attendant is approaching with a smile on his face, since the piece of shit looks a lot nicer than it is and he probably thinks he can extort her. She takes out a pleasant smile and a knife and says “I've got the docking fee.”

“You've got the docking fee,” he agrees, which makes him much smarter than most low-level scum in middle-of-nowhere mining stations she's met before. She smiles a little harder, just to watch him flinch, and hands him the money, which is exactly what the berth is worth and no more. “Enjoy your stay!”

“I really will.” It promises, in fact, to be a boring mission, which is the only reason she could convince Zeph to let her come alone when they got word that the station had gotten a pod with one of the Lady's offspring but hadn't dissolved into chaos. That meant they'd probably handled the issue, and she just gets to torch the body to make extra sure.

The dock attendant starts scurrying away, and Dutch dismisses him from her attention before she walks down three berths, looking out for any danger automatically, and sees something unexpected instead.

“You!” she says, spinning on her heel and stopping the dock attendant mid-motion. He appears to be trying to look up specs on the Black Root ship, either because he's nosy or because he's a thief. If he thinks he can steal it, good luck to him. Dutch has had one of the best thieves in the J try to steal her ship before, and the best he managed was coming along.

“I didn't do it!”

Dutch jerks her head at the berth she's standing next to. “I need into this berth.”

He raises his hands. “Look, lady, it's more than my job is worth to—”

She produces another hefty chunk of joy that she'd set aside for bribes. This is the most important bribe of all. “I seem to have forgotten something on my ship. Let me back in, won't you?”

The nice thing about scumbags are that they behave predictably. He edges over to her, snatches the money, and lets her into the berth before running off in hopes that the proper owner of the ship won't come back and choose to blame him.

Joke's on him. This ship is Dutch's far more than the other one is. She knows the shape, but that could fool her. It's not a common model, but there are a few out there. There aren't any others, though, with her exact pattern of dings and scorches and general wear. There are a few new ones, which she's going to have to ask about, but that doesn't mean Dutch doesn't recognize her.

She puts her hand on the keypad, and the ramp opens. “Hello, Dutch,” says a voice she hasn't heard in nearly a year.

“Hello, Lucy,” says Dutch, and comes on board.

*

John isn't in. Of course he isn't. If he were, he would have seen her come through the security around his berth and he would have come to meet her.

Dutch walks the familiar halls and can't keep down the stupid giddiness at being in them again. Lucy is her home too, and she's missed her almost as much as she's missed John. Her room and D'avin's are both shut up tight, but there's a guest room showing some signs of use, and John's things are scattered everywhere, some new and some familiar. In the cockpit, she finds herself picking up a sweater and holding on to it until Lucy makes a ding that sounds like the clearing of a throat.

“Should I call John? If you've found us, there must be an emergency.”

“Oh, no, there's not.” Dutch puts the sweater down, stupidly guilty. “One of the Lady's nasty little packages is supposed to have washed up here. I had no idea where either of you were, it's been a week or two since I heard from John.”

It's not like the first time he left, when she kept stupid track of every day between messages. Now she knows she'll see his face, even just on a recording, once or twice a month, and that he'll tell her some things but not everything, and she knows he's coming back. It's less than a month now, if she counts it from the exact day, but she doesn't know if he will, and hasn't had the courage to ask. John's sense of time has never been great.

“We heard about the spawn too,” says Lucy, and Dutch's attention sharpens on what she's saying, not just the fact of her presence. “Olli let us know that one had crashed here and there are rumors the station administrator is trying to get DNA from the corpse to use in experiments.”

“Shit.” Most people see a monster and they're all too happy to let the RAC take it off their hands, but some places, the worst places, try other strategies. One made a spawn a zoo habitat and let people pay to watch it kill whatever it wanted to. Another had some kind of cult. Of course there's this too. “Well, this is my warrant, so I guess we're working together. Where's he at now? Doing recon?”

“John is currently breaking into the station administrator's office to find where the spawn is located,” says Lucy, serene as ever.

“Double shit,” says Dutch, grabs an extra weapon from one of the cockpit stashes that John hasn't moved, and runs off to find him.

*

Having Lucy in her ear again, telling her where the office is, where John is in relation to it, while she crawls through maintenance access tunnels, makes her feel like no time has passed at all, like her memories of missing him have just been a bad dream.

“John is once again asking me why I'm advising him to wait before he goes in, since we have a small window of time,” says Lucy when Dutch is halfway across the station. “I could tell him you're here.”

“You are not to do that, he's really noisy when he's surprised.”

“You think he won't be surprised when you show up?”

Lucy's right. She always is. But even a year without her, missing her but not as much as she's been missing Johnny, can't keep Dutch from being a little annoyed about that. She doesn't know how to say that she could have tracked John down when he left the first time, no matter how well he hid, but she was always too scared that he'd run away, and that she's afraid of the same thing now, that even so close to the deadline, he'll be so far from ready that he can't bear to look at her. If she let Lucy tell him and he ran, she wouldn't get to see him at all. “I can deal with it if I'm in range,” she says, which is true.

“If you go left here, and then take the third right, you'll be right above him.” Lucy is a spaceship and really should not be able to sound as judgmental as she does. “And there's only another hour in our safe investigation window.”

Dutch sighs and crawls faster, and takes Lucy's directions as she goes, and finds herself in an access hallway where she peers through a grate and finds that John is loitering wearing the uniform of the local housekeeping staff and glowering at his PDD, which is probably where he is conducting his argument with Lucy.

She indulges herself in ten seconds of staring at him, making sure he's unhurt and properly fed. From above, at least, he just looks like John, with a fresh haircut just a little too short and more weapons than usual disguised on him, from what she can tell from the fit of the uniform.

There's an access hatch four feet in front of her, but if she comes out of it without warning him, he would be fully justified in shooting her.

Dutch waits there, frozen, until the silence from Lucy starts feeling way too superior for her peace of mind, and then she taps three times, gently, on the metal in front of her, right over John's head. He jumps like someone shouted and looks up, gun already out, and then he stops and stares. The grate doesn't show much, especially not from below, but somehow he knows, because a smile breaks out on his face.

He doesn't do anything, doesn't say anything. Just stands there smiling, until it falters a little, when she can't make herself move. “Hello?” he says.

Dutch scrambles for the hatch, opens it, and drops through without thinking, making far more noise than she really should, and then she's smiling at him, feeling foolish and excited and so damn happy to see him. “Hi, Johnny. Need a partner for this one?”

He's smiling again, worry gone. “You have to promise me you haven't been lurking in the vents following me for this whole year first. That would just be sad.”

She snorts and rolls her eyes, and he always makes things so easy for her, even when she doesn't quite deserve it. “And here I was wondering if you were following me. RAC got word about the spawn, but not that there was someone already on it.”

“Mostly I'm here because the station admin is a piece of shit, Olli turned me onto it because of that. It's just a nice bonus that I get to deal with some spawn at the same time.” He holsters his weapon and then his arms are around her and hers are around him, a familiar and wonderful feeling that she lets go on just a few seconds longer than she should. “So, working together?” he asks into her hair.

“I already asked you that, remember?” She pulls away. “You got here first, your op. Where do you need me?”

“You on your own?”

“I wasn't expecting much trouble, figured it was already dead. Didn't think of the human factor, I guess. Sloppy of me, or I'd have brought Zeph or Fancy.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Not D'av?”

“He's got Jaq for a few weeks because there's some Qreshi bullshit going on and he doesn't want his kid seeing one of his mothers eviscerate someone.” She makes a face. “Apparently they're going fishing.”

Johnny makes a face in return. “Does D'av even know how to fish? What have you guys been doing while I was gone?”

“Pretty sure he doesn't, but I wasn't going to argue with him about it.” She stands there for a moment too long, smiling into his so-familiar face, until Lucy gives a pointed readout of their expected clear window. “Just me, though. What do you need?”

He tilts his head, ticking through whatever plan he has going, and then shrugs. “Simple is best, right? I break into the computer, you watch out and kick the ass of anyone who comes through the door?”

It's the same plan they've done a thousand times before, even if usually she's the one giving the instructions. It's an easy pattern to fall into. Dutch grins at him, way more excited than standing at the door hoping someone shows up to keep her from dying of boredom should make her. “I think we can handle that.”

“Then you'd better handle it fast,” says Lucy in Dutch's ear, pissy and wonderful as always. “Significantly less than an hour now.”

“Let's do this,” says Dutch, and lets Johnny take the lead down the hallway.

*

“His password is his mom's name and birthday,” John reports about fifteen minutes later, while Dutch is leaning against the doorway and idly sketching out a plan for how she'd run this station's security if she were in charge. “And I am about ninety percent sure he's married, which makes that even weirder and creepier. However, he is up to some shit. In a creepy semi-secret lab on a sublevel.”

“Love a good sublevel.” Dutch glances over her shoulder. Johnny is scowling at the screen in front of him. “You need anything else off that, or should we go before someone else shows up? Because I fancy burning a lab down.”

“You cannot burn things down on space stations, that is rule one of space stations. But we can shoot a lot of stuff.” He hits a few more keys. “And I'm just putting a few viruses into his system for fun, then we'll be out of here. I thought I was going to have to pretend to be a scientist or something, it's going to be a lot more fun if we can go in guns blazing.”

“Have you copied the data for Zeph?”

“No, because I've never met her, of course I'm copying the data for Zeph, I've been sending her data dumps all year.”

Which Zeph hasn't mentioned, but then again, Dutch tends to start rolling her eyes when the two of them get going, so she can't really blame her for that, especially when they've both been so busy. “Good.”

“Is she going to send it to Aneela? Because I'm not going to lie, I don't love that plan.”

“Pretty sure Aneela has any information she wants about the Lady's spawn, now come on, have you finished?”

John taps a few more keys, possibly just to make the point that he won't be rushed, and then steps away, stowing his PDD and a few data sticks. “Yeah, let's get out of here. Hey, Luce, got us a way down to that sublevel?”

“Now you listen to me,” she says, the pissiest ship Dutch has ever met, and she loves both of them so much she has to grin while she listens to Lucy's directions and gets out her gun to start moving.

*

“It's like creepy lab people all buy from the same supplier. Why do they all look like this?” John says under his breath as they climb into the sublevel from the elevator shaft, where it is all clean and clinically white with lights that cast it all over with blue and a big ominous tank on the far wall where the Lady's dead spawn is preserved.

“It doesn't look much different to a non-creepy lab,” Dutch points out. “But yeah, the creeps do love one-color lighting.”

“Who the fuck are you?” says some of the local scum, and there are a few minutes where they can't talk about the color scheme, but that doesn't really matter, because Johnny grins at her when someone hits a switch that turns on the alarms, with some flashing lights, also blue.

The alarm doesn't seem to go to station security, but to some secret guards with different uniforms than the others, and at the head of them is the station administrator, good looking in a creepy kind of way, with that smug look that people who think they're in charge and haven't had anyone tell them otherwise in a while get. “I knew it would only be so long before I got thieves here,” he starts, smug and ready for a speech.

John tilts his head at her, and a year away, Dutch still knows what he means, and she smiles and keeps her gun trained on the station administrator while she takes out her RAC badge. “Thieves? No, I'm on a legal warrant to take back the Quad's property. Unless you want to go up against the RAC?”

That has a little more sway than it did a year ago. People know that the RAC are the people coming around saving them from the monsters who keep landing. A few of the guards look uneasy, but of course the kind of person who wants to extract DNA from alien creatures is the kind of person who isn't going to worry about that. He sneers at her. “Can they stop me? I'm in charge of this station, the Quad doesn't have jurisdiction here, even if the RAC is their own private security force now.”

“You've got it the wrong way around,” says Dutch, and looks at John. “Your call.”

“And it's not even my birthday,” he says, and cocks his gun. “But really, I was hoping you wouldn't give up easy.”

That's enough of a signal. Dutch shoots the station administrator in the knee, and while he's on the floor crying about it, she does the same to three of his special little security force, until they get the point, and then there's a lot of surrendering and tying them up. She gags the administrator with one of his own socks while she wraps his leg so he doesn't bleed out before he can go on trial, mostly because he's annoying her. “What now?” she asks. “I was coming here expecting to grab the spawn and go, you're the one who knows what's going on.”

“I've got a new toy I was going to bring you as a present, courtesy of me and some hackmods, so that's where we start.” He pulls a silver tube out of a pocket and wanders over to the tank holding the spawn, where he presses a few buttons and something extends into the tank. A few seconds later, a light flashes. “Only about a ten percent chance of a little implosion, but we should probably back off a few steps anyway,” he says, and Dutch knows to take him at his word when there's an experimental bit of tech involved.

“What is it, then?”

“Modified version of the good old gene bomb. These things don't have DNA, exactly, but we figured out how to extract enough to do the same thing—I get a sample, I press the button, it goes away. Plus any other bits of it within ten yards or so, so probably most of anything he's got stowed elsewhere in the lab too.”

Dutch looks at the station administrator, anxious but still a little smug, and says “Probably he's got some stored elsewhere too. We'll have to track that down.”

“What a shame. Want to do the honors?”

“Not if it's going to implode.”

John just grins at her, and with all the fanfare in the world that can come with pressing a button, does it. The tank does shatter, leaking whatever they were keeping the spawn in all over the floor. It must be unpleasant, considering the way the security people yelp and wiggle away from the spill before it can reach them. When the immediate chaos is over, though, there's no sign of it anywhere. “Maybe not as fun as setting it on fire,” John admits, “but thorough.”

“You're going to have to make about twenty of those.”

“Please, like I haven't already. I told you I was bringing presents, right?”

“Zeph and Aneela are going to be very excited.”

“And you?”

She grins and puts an arm around him. “Like you said. Not as good as setting things on fire, but I can live with it.”

*

A year or two ago, they would have had to run off, after taking down the person in charge of the station and all his most favorite fighters. Now, the RAC has a lot more trust, and when Dutch explains what they were doing in that lab to several more people, enough of them react with open horror that she feels fine dumping the mess in their laps while Lucy goes through the data from the computers to see where any samples are.

They end up going over the station setting off John's device everywhere they can reach, in case of stored samples, and end up at loose ends in an out of the way corridor hours later, with no real idea if they found anything or not. Probably Dutch will have to shoot the asshole in his other kneecap if she wants to be sure they get all the samples, which means staying another day or so, most likely. “Where are you off to?” she asks off the tail end of that thought.

He blinks at her. “Uh, nowhere? At least not tonight. Or until we find those samples. Then, I don't know. Thought I'd take the long way back to the Quad, before I ran into you.”

“And now?”

“I don't know. But I'm tired and really sick of crawling around all this station's hidey-holes. Want to go back to Lucy, get a drink while we wait to hear what they're doing with that asshole?”

She grins at him. “You know, I really do.”

*

It takes a glass and a half of hokk before things really start feeling normal again, the two of them sitting on the couch, John slumping over, Lucy sighing at both of them and complaining that she's doing data analysis while they're having fun and Dutch reminding her that she can't actually process alcohol.

“I missed you,” Johnny says when she finishes that retort and sits back, feeling pleased with herself about winning a point in an argument with her ship for the first time in a year.

“You too.” She puts down her glass to take his hands. “Did you find what you needed?”

“I don't know. I think maybe.” He's quiet for a while, and Dutch wonders if that's it. He's sent her messages, and sent D'avin messages, and Jaq and Pree and Zeph and even, apparently, Turin and Fancy once or twice, and they've all compared notes, but they don't say everything. She knows he spent months with the hackmods, made them his temporary home base in between everything else. She knows he rented a house somewhere green and pleasant for a month and almost went out of his mind with boredom. There's a lot, though, that she doesn't know. “I mean, I found out that it really sucks spending a year without you and everyone else.”

That's a relief, and a start, but it isn't everything she wants to know. “Is it going to be like before, though? If you're lonely if you stay or lonely if you go ...”

“Hey.” He shuffles closer so their sides are pressed together. “You don't make me lonely, okay? Sure, maybe I left thinking hey, I'll come back with someone I want to spend my life with so it's less weird living with my partner and my brother. But I'm not lonely anywhere. I have you guys, and everyone in the Quad, and Lucy.”

“Is that going to be enough?” It's the big question, the one she knows can't ever be truly answered. It would be unfair to ask him for something now and tell him he can't change his mind. If he needs to leave again someday, she has to be able to let him without calling him a liar, so she can't pressure him into making promises he can't keep.

“I don't know. But hey, maybe I can take a week once in a while, go see Olli, make a new friend or two. But I was always coming home. You know that, right?” When she doesn't answer, he prods her gently with his elbow. “Right?”

“I guess so. If you really had stolen my ship after so long, I would have had to come after you.”

John frowns at her like he knows that's not a real answer, because Dutch knew it, of course she did, but that doesn't mean she always believed it. “Good,” he finally says, lapsing into a smile, letting her off easy. “Playing cat and mouse with you sounds fun, actually, maybe we should give that a try.”

“Please. I'd have you in hours.” She scowls. “If D'avin's damn ship would listen to me.”

He laughs and tips his mug against hers. They're both her work, and one of them has a mended crack in it. They both have to hold them without putting them down, because they wobble when set on flat surfaces, but he's kept them, and they were at the front of the kitchen cabinets. They settle into a comfortable silence for a few minutes, drinking, Dutch refilling her mug first, before he speaks again. “How soon do you have to be back?”

She tilts her head back, thinking through the fog of a bit too much hokk. “No warrants on the docket, I think. D'avin's gone for a week or two. I think he was just planning to be back for—”

“For when I'm supposed to be back?” he says when she stops, and she nods. “I bet you guys were going to throw a party. They still should, but I'm thinking I might kidnap you.”

“What?”

“D'av's gone with Jaq, you hate the ship you came in on, and didn't I just say I was taking the long way back to the Quad? A couple weeks, you and me. I bet we could find some bar fights.”

Dutch sits up straight, stupidly giddy and stupidly nervous. “You're sure? You deserve your year. I mean that.”

“I needed a year off from being a killjoy, not from being around you. And I bet you haven't had much time off in the past year either.” She's had a few scattered weeks, here and there, but the Lady sent out a lot of pods, and there's been a lot of cleanup to do. “So come on. If you came on a Black Root ship, it's not going anywhere, you can call Fancy and tell him to pick it up, he could use a good road trip. And you and me … we don't have to stay here.”

She puts a hand on his arm before he can finish. “Don't make any promises you can't keep.”

“Okay.” He puts his hand over hers and smiles at her. “But we don't. We can fly away, and have a few weeks of uncomplicated fun before we deal with anything else. And we can worry about partnerships and promises and anything else after that.”

The old promises have meant so much to her across the years, but new ones will matter too, especially now that they have people and places they're running _to_ instead of from. “And maybe this time,” she says, “we can run home.”

Maybe it's her turn to make promises, because he grins, and then laughs, and settles more comfortably with his arm around her shoulders and takes another drink of hokk. “Yeah. Shooting that asshole in the knee again to make sure we've dealt with the last of the spawn, getting in a few fights, and then home. Sounds good to me.” He looks up, a habit he's always been in even if Lucy's got sensors everywhere. “What do you say, Luce?”

“I'll send a message to the Quad telling them to pick up the other ship,” she says, a little exasperated. “And you have ten messages from the new station administrator, when you have a minute.”

Dutch grins and stands up. “Time to sober up and take care of some business, then.” She holds out a hand. “Come on, let's do this.”

John takes her hand and groans himself to standing, follows her to the same place they always stow their medical supplies while Lucy grumbles about them being irresponsible, the two of them falling back into place after a year away, moving easily together, grabbing their weapons and some preemptive pills for their hangovers when the hokk starts wearing off.

Dutch looks over her shoulder as they leave, at the home she's been missing almost as much as she's missed John, the one that's hers again now that he's back, hopefully for good, even if he takes more vacations in the future.

“Are you coming?” John asks, and she follows him out of their berth just in time to wave at the very surprised dock attendant from earlier as he walks by.

It feels unreal, and it feels so easy that it's like he never left, but they're partners again. Dutch knows that much, and she can work out everything else from there. “Right with you,” she says, and gets to work.


End file.
